Best of 2026

We’re each attached to years of texts, Slacks, searches, and pictures, a digital archive of self-incrimination and humiliation. Now, hacks, lawsuits, and data breaches are increasingly exposing these records. What if it all got out?

For $100, I bought bric-a-brac that explains a nation.

The human roots of the Sino-Indian divergence

“Flesh-eating” bacteria are spreading. Infectious fungi are emerging. Microbiomes may never be the same. Shayla Love reports on how climate change is transforming the “unseen majority” of life on Earth.

One fateful decision 100 years ago created parallel lives. How does a family broken by the bizarre rules of racism heal itself after three generations apart?

Confronting America’s gerontocratic crisis

Anna Wiener profiles a twelve-year-old and asks, “What’s it like to be a kid these days?”

In the span of about 20 minutes, I lost my wife, my best friend, and my grip on life. Finding it again took a lot longer.

The lure of racetrack betting came early and hit hard, but before that, I dreamed of becoming an author. A chance encounter with one of my all-time heroes—and his belief in me—changed my luck forever.

The voluntarily surrender of the public’s power is how autocracies are built.

The internal logic of the world’s strangest corporations

If it were an industry, money laundering would be the third biggest business in the world, behind commercial property...

OpenAI's Sora allowed you to deepfake yourself. Users started to remember things that never happened.

For us to trust it on certain subjects, researchers in the growing field of interpretability might need to learn how to open the black box of its brain.

You should have gone before you left Earth

Ultrafinitism, a philosophy that rejects the infinite, has long been dismissed as mathematical heresy. But it is also producing new insights in math and beyond.

A broken phone or corrupted hard drive can mean the loss of work, evidence, art, or the last traces of the dead. Julian Lucas visits data-recovery experts who specialize in undoing disaster.

Who's buying our personal information, what they're using it for, and how the system works behind the screen.

Why young men aren't really going back to church, why liberals are sadder than conservatives, and how "Substack-ification" is transforming the future of Christianity, media, and politics

The screens got cheap. The shared experiences got expensive.